PrometheusTree64 — 11 years ago(February 24, 2015 09:45 AM)

Even in 1980, I heard people guffaw that: "that was the worst movie I've ever seen in my life."
The truth is, it's both really bad, with flashes of brilliance.
For one thing, it takes a satirical tone deliberately or not cheesily burlesquing the seedy sexual flavor of so many films from the late-'70s.
I'm not sure that it's possible for that to really work all that well cinematically, without the project being marred by the baseness it's portraying, as did all such projects at the time.
Even though I'm very fond of the 1970s (and it got a bad rap during the endless revisionism of the '80s) there was a definitively sleazy, gutter undertone to the latter half of the decade which worked its way into even mainstream movies. (CRUISING seems a prime example which, while not graphic by today's standards maybe, nonetheless tapped into the sordid, carnally apocalyptic tone of the day). Likewise, the period seemed the apex of real life serial killer zeitgeist somehow.
DTK struggles to parody and indulge in all of that simultaneously, and it achieves an uneven balance.
And yet the museum sequence, although silly at times as well, can't be ignored.
Still, believing Angie Dickinson can't get laid seems a stretch.
The most profound of sin is tragedy unremembered.